01/21/2011 – “Sacred Trip” Carlos Enriquez Gonzalez Solo Show

Toy Art Gallery is proud to present “Sacred Trip”, new work by Carlos Enriquez Gonzalez. “Sacred Trip” continues Gonzalez’s exploration of the divide (or lack thereof) between Man and God, man and woman, and toy and art. Gonzalez’s work challenges the viewer with an intermingling of grotesque, sexual, and childlike symbols, which together produce wholly original, substantially, and more importantly, beautiful works of art.

“The sacred trip, the light and the darkness. Look up the universe’s mysterious unknown. Nothing is like it seems. What is outside is inside, what is inside is outside.”

“Sacred Trip” opens January 21st 2011, from 7-11 PM, and runs through February 19th.

Carlos Enriquez Gonzalez was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1968. He studied in the “ School of Visual Arts Cristóbal Rojas ” (1989, Caracas , Venezuela ), “Art Student League of New York ” (2001, New York , NY. USA ) , and a Master on Practice and Review of the contemporary visual representation systems, at the “ Universitary Institute of Higher Education on Plastic Arts Armando Reverón” (2002, Caracas , Venezuela ).

His work goes from sculpture, installations, photography, 3D animation and video art to a reflection of existence and life as a way to state a new perceptive path through images and symbols that evoke from the grotesque to the sublime, from the childish to the sacred, a sort of confrontation with the spectator which motivates to question himself from the symbolic connections that the artist proposes in his work but in an underlying and unconscious manner.

Among the materials used by the artist for his work are: fiber glass, plastic, automotive
paint, crystal, gold, platinum, diamond, metal, raw meat, connecting an aesthetic three-dimensional finish with more organic materials.

Mushrooms, eyes, monsters, brains, human parts, sacred elements, sexual organs are some of the symbols that refer to the artist´s intimate world in which also blend some of
his concerns, energy, power, intuition, parallel worlds, multidimensionality, tunnels of time, all this reflected in his work represented in a provocative and transgressor mode.

In the work “MAGICAL VAGINA” the artist intends to embody one of these ideas: vagina as the giver of life, a symbolic tunnel through which we can go from one world to another, birth, death, transformation.

In a world in which the culture of the phallic has been imposed and the vagina mistreated
and denigrated to the point of being seen as something vulgar or pornographic, arises the proposal of its vindication to take her to the same level of equality with the phallic symbol, its encephalic body and its standing posture point out the thinking presence, that feels,that observes its surroundings with her attentive eye and wants to be acknowledged, respected, the vagina life giver, powerful, exists, feels, wants to be loved without having to hide, enables rebirth, generates life.

I intend the confrontation with the free spectator, give him something that invites him to reflect about the theme on how this feminine organ has been mistreated and denigrated, because the vagina can connect us with the most pure, powerful and mysterious forces of the universe God present? the vagina has been wounded for a long time, “skimmed blood”.